Viruses and Used Hard Drives

Is it possible for a malware/virus/whatever bad software to be permanently part of a hard drive even after a full format/full erasure, or does the erasing/formatting process completely wipe any trace of the virus on the hard drive?

my father's computer suffered a short, and he lost his C: drive (completely bricked); luckily, he made a full backup of all documents/files he deemed important a day before it happened on a portable hard drive, and on-top of a new display monitor (left old one on too long, thing's got screen burn), I figured getting him a new desktop Hard Drive (used, from ebay) would help him too. I just worry about the possibility of it, and would like to know if a full format/full erasure would help

BrokenDaily said:

Is it possible for a malware/virus/whatever bad software to be permanently part of a hard drive even after a full format/full erasure, or does the erasing/formatting process completely wipe any trace of the virus on the hard drive?
my father's computer suffered a short, and he lost his C: drive (completely bricked); luckily, he made a full backup of all documents/files he deemed important a day before it happened on a portable hard drive, and on-top of a new display monitor (left old one on too long, thing's got screen burn), I figured getting him a new desktop Hard Drive (used, from ebay) would help him too. I just worry about the possibility of it, and would like to know if a full format/full erasure would help

When you delete/erase a partition, remnants are left. Once something is written to the space, it can be deleted, but it is never fully deleted. That's how things can be recovered. Now, with that being said, if you are worried about a virus or something installing itself back after a full partition erase/deletion, then 99% chance, it won't happen.

You can have a look here for a list of tools to fully format the drive. Four of them are free.

Five hard disk cleaning and erasing tools - TechRepublic

Another choice I use is the free GPARTED LiveCD and boot to it or connect a drive to my Linux machine that includes GPARTED. Windows tends to have more issues with infections than Mac or Linux so cleanup for me has been better on my Linux.

Viruses in partitions should be no problem, they'll be 'lost' if you repartition and format the drive. A few viruses are known to infect the MBR. To be safe, use DISKPART from a Command Prompt, select the disk then use diskpart's CLEAN command to delete the MBR.

If you can't attach the drive as an external drive on a working PC to do this, you could install it in your father's computer and boot from a Windows install usb to get a Command Prompt. Option One in this tutorial.

Open Command Prompt at Boot in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

If you want to make sure that it is gone for good, fill up your HDD with random text files (of your own) and then delete those when your HDD is full.

Files that are sent to the Recycle Bin or Erased are simply marked for deletion & hidden from users viewing it. Once something overwrites the space that the "erased" file took, then it is removed for good.